


Diamond and a Tether

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 07:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, he knows that the person in the passenger seat isn't just Sam, and Dean has no one to blame but himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diamond and a Tether

You’re burning a ghost and it feels like such a silly thing to do.

Like washing a car in the rain or trying to catch a storm in a bottle.

There’s a house behind you that’s painted a deep cranberry red, a house that slumps to one side like it’s exhausted. Sam sits on the porch, thumbing through some old books he’d found, head leaning against a pole and the shape of his mouth all soft.

Earlier, the wailing spectre in the house had thrown him into a wall and his eyes had gone blinding white. You looked away, as you always do. You stood, leaning against the doorjamb while the angel smote the ghost with his gaze. Some wordless panic seemed to skyrocket from the base of your spine and set your brain on fire.

“He will not remember,” Ezekiel told you, reassuring as he is whenever he slipped through the cracks. You closed your eyes and clenched your teeth so hard you wondered why they didn’t shatter. Sure enough, Sam woke up with your hand in his hair and a dizzy half-smile on his face and mouthed, “ _Sorry,”_   and your skin felt tight with swelling secrets.

“Dean,” he says now, voice hoarse with the ghosts of past sickness, “Are you okay over there, man?”

“Super,” you say, the night blurring as you twist to beam at Sam. “Just super, Sammy.”

You’ve got soot on your hands and sweat on your skin and both of it making grime-tracks on your face. You’ve got a little brother who’s sometimes an angel. Your love is a heavy thing, stinging and cutting, strangling its object like a seagull caught in a trawling net, and you cannot reel it in for all you’re worth, cannot let the seagull fly. You look at your brother and wonder if that kind of love leaves marks, scars under his skin, keloids mapping the places where you strangled him to life again and again.

You’re not okay.

*

Sometimes you know Sam better than anyone else in the entire world, and at other times he’s a closed book, a forbidden kingdom. 

You know his half-hearted disgust at some of the things you do, his candle-flame adoration at the other things. You know him small enough that his hand could get lost in yours, you know him miles tall and still easily woundable. You know him with hellfire flickering in his eyes,  with a laugh brightening his face, with his trademark frown that can wind you up like crazy. You know him drunk, sober, addicted, happy, bereaved, hoping, dying. You know him every which way.

And then, sometimes, you don’t.

You stumble along in the dark trying to look for signs and fill yourself up with paranoia. You measure the slope of his shoulders with your eyes and try to compare his slouch to the straight set of the angel’s. You wonder if he’s always that still in the passenger seat, if there’s something strange about the way streetlights glimmer in his eyes, if he’s ever held his fingers like that: interlaced tightly, with just enough space for a tiny world.

You have a list of things that Sam were that was not Sam, a list of times when something different looked out through his eyes, a list of drives when you spent a lot of the time peeking glances at him and trying to figure out who he is.  Sam is a lot of things, has been a lot of things. You know that at the bottom of it all, if you’re brave enough and stubborn enough to strip down all the layers, he’s still Sam, still the one person on the entire planet who can cut you with a look, one derisive smile, who can make you smile just as easily.

You know that the single basic immutable thing about you is the need to keep him here, close enough that a sharp careen to the right might knock your knee against his.

“You okay, Dean?” he asks, and you wonder why this question keeps coming back, looping on itself, and then you wonder if it isn’t _Sam_ who’s asking this time. Your eyes snap to meet his gaze, but it’s not like Ezekiel to mumble along semiconsciously to a Skynrd song, quiet and peaceful with just a hint of a question aimed at you. Sam’s eyebrows peak and you think, _oh, he’s waiting for an answer._

You grumble. “Would you stop with the hovering already? I’m not the one that nearly died tonight.”

“Nearly _died_ ,” Sam echoes, with a little curling smirk, “Getting thrown into walls is like, part of our routine. Y’know, I’d start church-going if it didn’t happen at least twice on a monthly basis.”

“Well, you nearly _died_ twice this month already. You’ve depleted your quota of near-deaths.”

“ _You’ve_ depleted your quota of freakiness. Seriously, Dean, what’s with all the eyeballing and shifty looks? You think I don’t notice?”

You sneer at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t,” Sam says, drily. His eyes bore little holes in your skin. You hate it when he does that. “You’re all secretive and weird and stuff.”

Your skin tightens in anticipation, fingers clench on the wheel. There’s a weird feeling inside of you, of something big and dark cut loose and allowed to wander through the hallways of your brain. Your heart hammers against your throat. You want to swallow but you can’t remember how, and Sam is looking at you with his expression of tolerant exasperation.

“Dean, what’s goin’ on?”

You flick a glance at him and it’s like you look straight through Sam and at your co-conspirator, as if Ezekiel is hiding behind a screen. It’s like you both re-affirm your secret across the confessional window of your brother’s eyes.

“Just lemme be, Sam,” you mutter thickly, suddenly feeling sick to your stomach.

The feeling gets worse when Sam doesn’t push it and you don’t know if that’s just Sam honouring your wishes, or if the person next to you and not prodding at you for answers is no longer Sam at all.

*

You drop Sam off at a motel, and then you don’t know what happens, and then you’re drunk.

The world is spinning, blurring, and every time you raise your head a little, stars go shattering across your vision. Your neck feels like it’s melted long ago, so it’s kind of a feat that you’ve still got your head on. You know it’s still on because of the stars and the throbbing pain, but you don’t know what you’re supposed to do with it. One-dollar shots and too many of them, and then you’re leaning over a sink in a bar bathroom, staring at the hunk of rough yellow soap and scrubbing at your face and trying to stand straight.

“Messed up, man,” you tell yourself, kind of breathless, and it’s all so funny. Sammy was in a hospital and then he wasn’t because you secreted an angel inside him. Bang-up job, Dean, smuggling illegal things past all military outposts.

You’re searching for a suitable metaphor: not angel-pacemaker because you’ve already used that, and you frown because the mirror seems to be melting off at the edges, and goddamn if that isn’t weird.

Someone raps on the bathroom door and yells all kinds of niceties at you, and you’re so pissed off that it’s all a wash of red in your vision, a blur like you’re a comet, and you open the door and answer with your fists.

You end up having to walk back the two blocks to the motel, stumbling and trying to hold yourself straight at the same time, nursing a split lip and possibly bruised ribs. You did more damage, but that doesn’t negate the feeling of being steamrollered in more ways than one.

The motel’s lights are pretty and blue, numbness inducing, little fairy-oasis-lights for poor drunk Lawrence. You try to remember the room number and fail miserably, and end up wandering the L-shaped strip for an unimaginably long time. Everything is strange and ephemeral, muted sounds from behind doors and the sky with clouds stretched out like saltwater taffy. Everything seems to shift and slide around you. Maybe the people in the rooms change if you walk past their door too many times. Maybe they fade out, disappear. Sam would be the only one unchanging, being weighed down with an angel and all. You don’t know how much a wingless angel weighs, but its ego has got to count for something.

Sam finds you on the concrete parking block, decrepit and morose, watching the tread marks some car has burned into the asphalt.

“C’mon, Dean,” you hear him say, his voice strange and rough and confused, eyes huge and incendiary. He crouches next to you, puts an arm around your shoulder, and you lean into him with the kind of relief reserved for him alone.

It’s unspeakable, pure; it’s your _brother._

You let him pull you up and steer you down the strip, and this is what you saved: this person holding you up, sure and solid and strong. You shake your head a little dazedly and smile at him, a wavering smile.

“S’rry,” you mumble, and don’t know what you’re apologizing for. “Sorry, Sammy.”

Sam looks kinda shocked and bewildered and deeply afraid, with some kind of hypnotic glittery effect going on in his eyes. You try to focus on him—not just the starkly clear lines of his face, but the whole of him, and there’s something odd happening with his edges, a strange lack of clarity. His hair is all funny and you don’t get why. You squint harder, trying to tone down the bright white-out at the edges of your vision, trying to see around Sam’s head, and then you jerk out of his grip and nearly go sprawling face-down on the asphalt.

Your brother has a halo.

- _fin_

 

**Author's Note:**

> This thing—wholly due to my current bout of insomnia, which has been going on for 4 days and counting. I got around 90 minutes of sleep yesterday and most of the rest of the night was maudlin, mushily sentimental thinking, so it’s good that at least a fic came out of it. And I wanted to write Dean. The B-side to this whole scenario right now. (Which is weird, seeing as in 9.01 fanfic, Sam is not the A-side either!)


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